Gemma stood up, her hands over her mouth in shock.  There was absolutely no doubt in her mind.  That was her daughter, her only daughter, Kellie, walking across the screen, waving to the crowd, already a giantess, looking weary even at this hour of the morning.  She watched the girl touch her wrist and grow to even more colossal size, striding out of the shot and doubtless across a city block with each stride.

Gemma sagged back onto the sofa, her head swimming.  How could that be Kellie?  Kellie was at school.  Of course, Kellie was at school now!  By now, classes were in session, and she would have gotten off the bus and arrived at school.

Wanting reassurance, Gemma called the high school office to double-check Kellie’s status.

Meanwhile, Kellie was carefully making sure she hit the height she had been when she tucked her street clothes into her cleavage earlier.  Standing in a wooded area in a park near the school, she got the clothes out and placed them on the ground, then shrunk down to normal size.  Taking the mask and belt off, she tucked the mask into her purse and put the belt back onto her street clothes.  They were a little bit big -- she’d slightly missed her target size as a giantess -- but were close enough that she could make them work.  She was getting better at nailing specific sizes, and with more practice, she’d be able to do this perfectly.

Gemma hung up the phone, her effort at reassuring herself a failure.  Kellie wasn’t at school. 

She’d asked the office to call her back if and when Kellie arrived.  Now the mother set back down, staring through the floor, trying to figure out what to do next.

Kellie knew she’d need to stop in the office to sign in and did so.  When asked why she was late, she told the receptionist she’d missed the bus, then was released to go to class.

Soon after the receptionist called Gemma.  “Mrs. Ross, this is Jackson High School.  I’m just calling to let you know that Kellie, your daughter, just checked in.  She’s here now.”

“OK, thank you,” Gemma said.  “Did she say why she was late?”

“She said she missed the bus.”

Gemma’s brow furrowed.  “OK, thanks again,” she said.

“No problem,” the receptionist said.  “Good-bye.”

Gemma sat down.  That answer made no sense.  The bus stop was within sight of her house, and Kellie knew her mother’s work schedule well enough to know that she could have given her a ride to work today,  The only way Kellie would have said that was if Kellie was lying … and it wasn’t like Kellie to lie … But, if Kellie was Elevator Girl, then she might lie for something that important, especially if lives were involved.

But how could Kellie be Elevator Girl?  That made no sense.  Kellie had no superpowers … that Gemma knew of … and how did she get them if she had them?

Then it hit Gemma:  Reporters had said, after Elevator Girl’s first case, that Elevator Man was her mentor.  Gemma had never seen Elevator Man, and had barely heard of him.  Maybe if she knew something more about this long-ago superhero, she could put some of this together.

Gemma went to the old tower computer she had kept nursing along and got on the Internet.  She ran a search for Elevator Man and found a web page devoted to him within a Super 6 website.

When she got a look at Elevator Man’s face, Gemma’s blood ran cold.  She knew that face.  She had been to the funeral of the man she associated with that face about a month before.  It was the face of her father-in-law, Kellie’s grandfather, Blake Ross.

Suddenly it all began to make sense.  Blake was an inventor;  Elevator Girl had come on the scene just after he’d died, and just after he’d had a final visit with Kellie, and only Kellie out of all the family,  He must have given her a device that let her become Elevator Girl.

Gemma walked away from the computer and sank down in an old, overstuffed chair that had been her husband’s before he died.  Usually, when she sat there, she felt comforted by a sense of his presence,  Now, she was lost in a haze of fear, confusion, anger and more fear.  She pulled over a throw pillow and huddled into the chair in terror.

Kellie found her day progressing more or less normally.  At lunch, she was approached by her friend, Jenna.

“Where were you this morning?” Jenna said.  “I missed you in algebra.”

Kellie shrugged.  “I missed the bus,” she said.

Jenna pulled back her head and turned it at a slight angle while making a face.  “That’s not like you,” she said.  “At least, not until your grandpa died.  Up to then, you were always on time for everything.  Now you’re late sometimes, or you run out early or just don’t show up at all.  What’s going on?”

Kellie’s eyes shifted back and forth.  “I don’t know,” she said.  “Maybe it’s just grief coming out in a sideways way.”

“I didn’t think you were that close to your grandpa,” Jenna said.

Kellie smiled wistfully, and a little bit sadly.  “Grandpa Blake was something special,” she said.  “I really only found out how special right at the end, right before he died.”

Gemma went in to Kellie’s room.  She didn’t want to mess anything up in the room, but she was reasonably sure the leather costume had to be somewhere around here, if Kellie really was Elevator Girl.  And it was nowhere to be seen.

Gemma decided to play a hunch.  The house’s unfinished basement was its least used area.  Even the upstairs rooms, mainly used for storage, saw more traffic than the basement. She would check both locations, upstairs and down, to see if the costume was there.

Kellie got on the bus for home.  “Missed you this morning,” said Rob, the bus driver.

“Yeah,” said Kellie.

Gemma hadn’t found anything upstairs.  She had gone to the basement, and nothing was immediately visible in the basement.  She was about to go upstairs when she remembered the old coal bin, a room into which an old chute for delivering coal ran.  It would be a natural way out of the basement If someone were trying to slip out unnoticed, she realized.

Gemma walked tentatively over to the bin’s door and opened it.  The only light came from the basement’s windows, but what she saw was unmistakable.  There was a cheap wooden table set up in the corner, a table she’d never seen before.  Draped over the table was something she had seen before, but only on television or the Internet.  It was a very familiar-looking leather costume.  The hip boots stood atop the table beside it, leaning against the wall.

The single mother felt as though her entire world had just crashed in upon her.  She didn’t know what to do from here, but she knew one thing.  She and Kellie were going to have a long talk.  And that talk would start with a visual aid.

Determined, even if she wasn’t sure exactly what she had determined, Gemma gathered up the bustier and hip boots and brought them upstairs.  Kellie was going to have some explaining to do.